Telegraph Avenue

Cochise Jones, wearing a leisure suit with a faded houndstooth check, stepped into the multipurpose room with Fifty-Eight manning the poop deck of his left shoulder, trailing a kid, perhaps a grandson, about Julie’s age, light-skinned, light-eyed, broad at the shoulder, and slender at the hips. Though as far as Julie knew, Mr. Jones didn’t have any family apart from the bird. When he noticed Julie, he frowned, looking thoughtful, hesitating, as if trying to make up his mind about bringing over the kid to meet Julie.

“He a friend of Fifty-Eight,” Mr. Jones explained straight-faced, apparently deciding that no harm could come of the introduction. “Also a fan of Mr. Tarantino.” Only he pronounced the name as if it rhymed with “Tipitina.”

“Hey,” said Julie, twisting a finger in the tattered selvage of his denim cutoffs until the blood ceased to circulate in his fingertip. His index finger in its noose of cotton thread swelled and pulsed and throbbed and in general served as symbol or synecdoche for its owner and his fourteen-year-old heart, for that all-encompassing, all-expanding disturbance in his skinny little chest that was the love of Tarantino, the world, or all mankind. “I like him, too.”

Titus Joyner nodded, mildly amused (if that) by the spectacle of Julie in his cutoffs and sleeveless T, his portable eight-track on the floor by his feet in their clear white jellies, with his bright blue flight bag like one of the moon stewardesses in 2001. He didn’t say anything. A slender, loose- and long-limbed kid, skin the color of a Peet’s soy latte. Hair worn in a neat, modest Afro with an air of studied retroism. Eyes wary, derisive, cold apart from that ghost of amusement, or maybe it was a flicker of recognition, as if he thought he knew how best to label Julie. Cleft chin. Clothes neat and spotless: dark jeans, short-sleeved, button-down oxford-cloth shirt. Nothing fancy, but somehow the crisp white shirt and the sharp creases ironed into the front of his trouser legs gave him an air of formality. On his feet he wore those imperial star-destroyer kicks.

“What’s up?” he said.

Julie took a card, newly printed, from his wallet, and passed it to the kid, one that read:

JULIUS L. JAFFE

Ronin ·HIRED BLADE

The look of mockery was still on the kid’s face as he studied the card, but he studied it. Slipped it into a pocket of his jeans. Then went to the back of the room to scatter his limbs across an upholstered armchair tucked into a corner.

“I’m sorry, sir.” It was one of the other students, a man in a wheelchair, speaking through a robo-box. Julie had seen the guy racing around Temescal, in the neighborhood of Brokeland, his body a toy in the paws of some brutal ailment. His voice came sparking through its Hawking box. “Sir? I’m sorry, but I have a bird allergy.”

“A bird allergy,” Mr. Jones said, looking blank, failing to see how this assertion could pertain to him. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Maybe you could— Can he wait outside?” said Peter Van Eder.

“Or . . . ?”

Fifty-Eight browsed politely through the silvery down at its breast, appearing to find no offense in the turn things had taken, but Mr. Jones, either because he had been looking forward to this series, or maybe on Fifty-Eight’s account, appeared to be heartbroken.

“It’s quite severe,” said the man in the wheelchair, the torsion of his neck giving him, no doubt unfairly, a sidelong and mendacious look as he said it, like maybe he was really just afraid of parrots or had something against Fifty-Eight personally. “I’m so sorry.”

Mr. Jones sighed. Even if he and Fifty-Eight had not been inseparable, there was no way you could leave a rare and costly bird sitting out in a hallway somewhere. He turned to the kid at the back of the room and raised a sheepish eyebrow. The kid stared at the dude in the wheelchair with open and admiring horror.

“You can get a bus?” Mr. Jones said. The kid knit up his limbs and gave a fractional nod, about to be left alone in this roomful of cripples and old people.

“Bye, Fifty-Eight,” Julie said. “Bye, Mr. Jones.”

“I feel terrible,” said the man in the wheelchair, but in the tonelessness of his voice-o-tron, it was hard to be sure whether he was referring to his remorse at the ejection of Fifty-Eight or the onset of anaphylaxis.

“Come on, fool,” Mr. Jones said to the bird.

Van Eder passed a syllabus to Titus Joyner, who thanked him softly, with an automatic “sir.” Then the kid’s eyes locked on the syllabus, scanned it. He frowned. Something written on the page dismayed him, filled him with outrage and confusion. He squirmed with it, deep in the armchair, until he was obliged to speak up.

“The Band Wagon?” he said.

His disdainful drawl intoned the title of the seventh film on the syllabus with a contempt so all-encompassing that it led one of the fearsome-looking, old, ex-nun-style, Communist, lesbian retired piano teachers who principally made up the enrollment of “Sampling as Revenge” to get up and start passing out oxygen masks and air tanks, so that all the other old people and Julie could go on breathing and not have the air sucked out of their lungs by the whooshing vacuum that followed this sally from the back of the room.

Peter Van Eder blinked and looked mildly amused. “Do you have a problem with The Band Wagon?” he said.

“It’s a musical,” Titus said. “It has, like, Sid Caesar.”

“Cyd Charisse,” said Peter Van Eder harshly, flatly, the way Julie’s old fencing teacher Mr. DiBlasio had been wont to correct Julie’s form with an impatient flat of the blade on the buttocks.

The kid nodded as if satisfied with this correction. He picked up his copy of the syllabus and held it at arm’s length in a display of nearsightedness that Julie took for mocking. “Gordon Liu,” he said slowly with a skeptic squint, pronouncing the Chinese name to rhyme with “shoe.” “Stanley Kubrick. Cyd Charisse.”

The old ladies—there were seven of them, all white—and the three old gents (one of them an Asian-American in an Oakland A’s cap) and the wheelchair guy apparently saw nothing at all droll or absurd in the presence of a Fred Astaire–Cyd Charisse film on that inventory of mayhem and martial arts action. On the contrary, they appeared shocked, even mildly disgusted, by the kid’s show of disrespect, either because they were old or because they were white or both. Julie was certainly shocked.

“Tarantino himself has often argued that his movies should be situated in the context of the big-screen musical, with the outbursts of violence serving the same structural narrative function as the musical numbers,” Peter Van Eder said. “Like a lot of Minnelli, The Band Wagon exhibits a strong female character of the kind that has come to be foregrounded in Tarantino’s work. More important—I’m getting ahead of myself, but whatever—the self-enclosed, self-reflexive world of actors and dancers it portrays prefigures exactly the hermetic, empty universe of physical artistry that we find in Kill Bill. It also showcases the technical virtuosity of Minnelli that is an acknowledged influence not only on Tarantino but on Martin Scorsese as well. In other words . . .”

Van Eder smiled, a stiff, genuine smile made more horrible somehow by its genuineness, in which were intermingled an ingratiating familiarity and a desire to put this kid in his place.

“. . . gots to be hip to Minnelli, my man.”

Julie wanted to die of his own whiteness, to be drowned in the tide of his embarrassment on behalf of all uncool white people everywhere when they tried to be cool. Titus Joyner glowered at Van Eder. He pursed his lips, easing them pensively back and forth, wavering perhaps between giving Van Eder his due for wisdom imparted and taking offense at that horrible “my man.”

“Lady Snowblood,” Van Eder went on.

He addressed the class for ten minutes, reading from a set of four-by-six index cards in a soft, stupefied, increasingly breathless tone like an astronaut pleading with a mad supercomputer to open an airlock, the voice that, for unknown reasons, Van Eder relied on for the imparting of information. He touched on the ambivalent place of women in the postwar Japanese economy, feudal history and Western values, the popularity in Japan of comic books like the original Snowbird, the Japanese literature of revenge, the tension between the needs of the individual and the norms of the community, et cetera. Then Van Eder switched on the video projector, pulled down the screen, and put out the lights.

Taking advantage of the sudden darkness, Julie turned to look back at Titus Joyner. The kid reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a set of massive spectacles, at once square and rounded, a style somewhere between early Spike Lee and Miles Davis on the cover of Get Up with It. In the flickering light from the projector lens, the kid saw Julie looking at him, and a smirk drew a fishhook at the corner of his mouth. Then he turned to the screen, and the disc spun inside the Panasonic projector, and the fan whirred, and the soundtrack scratched, and the cymbals clanged, and Julie dreamed for two hours with his eyes open.

It was a dream Kill Bill, angelic and ghastly, more beautiful, more simplistic, bleaker. More, he tried, existential. At least the Bride, Beatrix Kiddo, had known love and happiness, companionship, hope for the future. Even at her lowest, even comatose and raped by crackers, she carried the memory inside her, in the place vacated by the baby she had lost. Her revenge was haunted by the ghost of happiness. From birth, Yuki Kashima—Meiko Kaji, so delicate, so badass!—had never known anything but the curse of her bloody and useless use. And the swordplay! Criminals and rogues, masters and pupils, slashing and hacking, fatal parasols. And the blood! Severed limbs flying, blood on fresh fallen snow, curtains and cataracts of blood!

When the lights came up at the end, Julie’s reptile brain was dimly aware of Van Eder apologizing for having exceeded the time allotted for class, the rustle of papers, and the scrape of chair legs. The biomass designated as Julie Jaffe stood up, and its autonomic systems took over and propelled it toward a beige corridor, along beige linoleum tiles, through a beige world, while in another universe, his traveler soul honed its katana and ate rice with chopsticks by a fire and tied a thick topknot in its wild black mane. Julie was halfway to the snowy courtyard where the existentially absurd and beautiful combat between Yuki and her final enemy was appointed—halfway to the glass doors of the Southside Senior Center, which opened onto a cement plaza with a sculpture fountain—when he heard a strange howl behind him, canine and low at first, then rising to articulate a screech of mock Japanese challenge.

Julie whirled just in time to see the kid, Titus, coming at him, glasses returned to his shirt pocket, eyes twisted up with homicidal glee, kick-flying through the air while whirling an imaginary blade over his head.

“Hi-yah!” he cried, alighting only inches away and bringing his sword down as if to cleave Julie from cranium to coccyx. Julie drew and parried in a single swift motion, then stepped back in a shower of sparks and let the other kid’s crazy momentum carry him forward with an ungainly lurch. As the kid went past, Julie jabbed downward with his left elbow (stopping just short of striking the small of his back).

“Yah!”

The other kid regained his feet and swung around, and they exchanged a quick series of attacks and parries, simulating with their mouths the clash and clang of steel on steel as Titus backed out of the glass doors of the Southside Senior Center and into the summer night.

Yah!

Hah!

Hah-YAH!

As the ladies and the geezers in their ball caps shuffled past, Julie and his opponent hacked and ducked, slashed, feinted, thrust. They dashed around the wide floodlit plaza with its random scattering of concrete oblongs, hopping up and off, circling the fountain at the center. Julie, with two disappointing years of fencing lessons in his recent past, had the advantage of knowing what you could do with a sword if you actually held one, while Titus had the advantage that he always would have: The whole thing was his idea. He was the one causing things to happen, driving them, taking them seriously long enough and intensely enough—and in public—to make them somehow be. Julie chased him, and Titus ran, laughing. He leaped up onto the broad lip of the fountain and took a deep breath. Three concrete-jacketed light fixtures led like stepping-stones across the water to the sculpture, a big mutant hand of steel entitled Dancing Group II that grasped at the night sky from the center of the fountain. With the tip of his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth, Titus island-hopped the lights along to the sculpture. He scrambled up onto the steel palm of the open hand and stood there, beaming at Julie. Way down along Fourth Street, the train for Sacramento mourned its own passage. The air smelled of chlorine from the fountain, of cut grass from the soccer field on the other side of the Southside Senior Center.

“Dude, what’s your name again?” Julie called, though he knew it was breaking the spell. “Are you— Is Mr. Jones your, like, grandpa or something?”

For answer, Titus leaped from the sculpture into the air, out over the turbid pool water and the scattered wishes of pennies and dimes, helicoptering his blade over his head, legs outstretched fore and aft like a hurdler’s, clearing a gap of six horizontal and four vertical feet to land with a dainty stutter step on the lip of the fountain. Julie stopped breathing.

“Titus Joyner from Tyler, Texas,” he said. “And I am here to dismember your pink bicycle−riding, plastic shoe−wearing, Jethro Tull−singing, faggoty Mr. Spock ass.”

Julie’s heart seized, and then a strange fizz of wonder seemed to engulf him, as if he had been dropped like an ice cube into a glass of sparkling water. The previous evening, he and his parents had gone to Archy and Gwen’s for fish tacos, a specialty of the house. After a while, Julie had grown restless with the trend of conversation at the table and had wandered outside with his eight-track player to kill some time. On the little grass island where the neighborhood children were wont to abandon their toys, Julie had come upon a girl’s bicycle, pink with white handlebar grips and white rubber tires. Wearing a blue science-section Star Trek T-shirt with a black collar and the little flying “A” over the left breast, from which he had cut away the sleeves, Julie rode the pink bike around and around the cul-de-sac, singing along with the eight-track at the top of his lungs about how a bungle in the jungle was all right with him. He had not been aware that even then he was being observed by a cold intelligence from another world. Now he gaped up at Titus Joyner as the other boy brought down his weapon hard, and Julie, deeply interested and intensely embarrassed, allowed himself to be killed. He died.

“I can stay here?”

Julie jumped. Titus lay motionless under the shelter of the comforter, eyes closed, somniloquent.

“Uh, okay, yeah,” Julie said. “My dad went back down to the store, he probably won’t be home for a while. I think my mom’s at a birth, so she’s probably gone all day. You can shower. And I could, I have to do some laundry. I could wash your clothes.”

Julie, under the guise of a sudden blossoming of self-reliance and a desire to help around the house, had been washing Titus’s clothes secretly along with his own for the past two weeks. Titus had only three pairs of pants, three shirts, and five pairs apiece of socks and briefs, but he was obsessive about keeping himself neat and clean. He had a horror of bad breath that approached the pathological, and he spent an aggregate hour a day, at least, in the maintenance of his modest little ’fro.

“Nah, nah,” Titus said. “I mean can I stay here.”

“You mean— What? You mean, like, can you move in?”

From the time of his arrival in June on a flight out of Dallas, Titus had been cribbing, as he put it, in West Oakland, in an undisclosed location; at any rate, he would not disclose its location to Julie. Mr. Jones and Fifty-Eight were neighbors, that was all Julie knew. The house held nine people in three bedrooms, cousins and unrelated relations, all living under the furious, disregarded administration of Titus’s ancient auntie, who was actually a great- or maybe even a great-great-aunt. No one in that house, which—in Julie’s imagination—teemed at every window like a cartoon asylum with madmen and psychotics, knew or cared if Titus came or went, if he dressed and fed and cleaned himself, if he lived or died, smoked crack, or built himself a suitcase bomb in the basement. And yet every day, more or less, he appeared before Julie in crisp jeans and a bright white T-shirt, with the white oxford or one of two plaid short-sleeve button-downs, a blue-black and a green-black, worn unbuttoned over the tee. And the starship shoes, scrupulously tended. Julie was obscurely moved by this scrupulousness, so helping Titus maintain it felt not like a chore but an honor. An offering of love.

The eight-track cassette punched to the next program with a loud clunk, and Titus sat up, wild-eyed and startled. He reached into his pocket for his glasses, and Julie noticed for the first time the coiled plug of black electrician’s tape holding together, at the nosepiece, the right and left halves of his big Spike Lees. Titus had seemed weird last night when they first rendezvoused in Frog Park, but it was too dark then for Julie to spot the evidence of trouble.

“What happened?” Julie said. “Did you get in a fight? Did somebody— Did they say you had to leave?”

Titus appeared to be awake, blinking, swallowing, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, but it took a long time for a reply to emerge.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he finally managed, his voice little more than a whisper. Then he shook it off. “Shake it off,” he told himself.

He got up and came over to Julie’s bed, staring down through his lenses, and his expression was mocking, of himself, of Julie for his solicitude.

“I’ve seen things,” he said, looming over Julie, close enough for Julie to smell the orange and cloves of his own brand of underarm deodorant, smeared somehow across Titus as they had grappled that morning in the dark. “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.”

“C-beams in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. You can’t stay here.”

“Just tell them I’m your imaginary friend,” Titus said. “A only child, come on, you got to have a imaginary friend.”

“I did when I was little.”

“Yeah? What was his name?”

“His name was Cherokee.”

“Cherokee. He still live here?”

Before he could quite dismiss the question as the joke it was intended to be, Julie had a quick look around the attic. When he was four or five years old and sleeping in the room next to his parents’, he used to come up here to hide and conspire with his imaginary playmate. Now there was nothing left of Cherokee but the dry cool pulse of Indian fingers against his palm.

“Second, okay, that’s first, but second, you promised me, T.”

“What I say?” Titus gave the question an offhand spin and turned to examine, in a dish on the dresser, the orrery of small glass planets that Julie had made over the years at the Crucible. Trying to play it off, to persuade Julie that whatever rash thing he might have said was a joke, insincere, forgotten. “Only thing I promised you,” he continued, “is that when I’m a A-list Hollywood auteur, you get to help me out on the screenplays. I remember promising you that. Isn’t any other promise I remember.”

“You said you would . . . you know.” Julie felt his voice get very quiet. “If I came with you.”

Like Galactus, like some giant, timeless celestial older than the stars, Titus scooped up a handful of planets, tumbled them between his fingers, let them splash chiming back into the dish. “True,” he said. “But check it out, man.” He laughed, bitter laughter, contemptuous. “I’m afraid of her. I heard her one time kind of like whispering to him from the porch when he dropped a garbage bag all over the sidewalk. Reminded me of this principal I had back in Texas, had that same quiet way of getting angry, talking all soft and reasonable, then suspend your ass for three days ’cause you threw a pencil.”

“Yeah,” Julie agreed. “She gets all Eastwood.” Then, “How often do you go by there?”

“I followed him home a couple times.”

“Just, what, stalking him or something?”

“Just looking.”

Julie envisioned Titus pedaling past Archy and Gwen’s house at twilight, the sagging porch with its freight of bougainvillea, the life in which Titus was not permitted or could not bring himself to share passing back and forth like a movie to be memorized shot for shot across the screen of the big bay window. Then Titus turned around, and Julie was shocked to see that he had tears in his eyes.

“I am not going back to my auntie’s, tell you that,” Titus said, and a flat, genuine twang of Texas crept into his voice. He took off his glasses to wipe away the tears with the back of his arm, and the two halves fell apart, the wad of black tape giving way, the sections of broken frame rattling against the plywood subfloor of the attic. “No way I’m ever going back to that house.”

They stood there with six inches and an adamantine membrane of the multiverse between them. Julie longed to put his arms around Titus, to console him, but he could not be sure that Titus would welcome such a touch. Indeed, he suspected Titus would reject it. Julie could only guess, the intuition guided if not shaped entirely by the dubious and histrionic hand of ghetto melodramas, cop shows, and the brutal lyrics of rap songs, at the latest trauma that Titus had undergone.

Julie knelt and picked up the pieces, then carried them over to the bare pine table, its surface an action painting of Testors paint, scorched black in patches by the glue guns and the glowing elements of soldering irons, inscribed with an illegible cuneiform of X-ACTO-blade scars, where he had been wont, in the limitless trances of his loneliness, to assemble his scale models of AT-ATs and Gundam Wing fighters, and to ornament his little metal armies of orcs and paladins, and to invest the unspent and endlessly compounding principle of his inner and only life. There were three neat plastic racks of screw and nail drawers, and he rummaged among them until he came up with a tube of superglue, the crusted tip of its nozzle forever pierced, like some allegorical wound in a story of King Arthur, by its tiny red-capped pin. He squeezed out two drops and then eased the acrylonitrile halves of Titus’s glasses together with the practiced touch of a modeler until they held and there was not even a fissure visible. Then he handed them back to Titus, who gingerly tested the join. Without his frames, his face looked vulnerable, raw.

“Anyway, they just glass,” he said.

“Seriously?”

“I got like twenty-ten. I just wear them to, uh, make me look smart.” He put them on again, and something armored, sealed off, unassailable resumed its dominion over the features of his face.

“You could stay here tonight,” Julie told him, and as he said the words, he felt a pang of regret for them, intuiting the valediction they contained. If Titus accepted the terms with which Julie was about to present him, the period of their secret friendship would come to an end. After today, the world would know about Titus Joyner, and knowing that, would begin to know, or believe that it knew, Julius Jaffe, too. Yet he felt so far from being ready to know himself or contend with the world and its definitions. “After that, I don’t know, we’ll see.”

“Cool,” Titus said. “Damn, thank you.”

“Okay, it’s on one condition.”

“I’m not eating any more of that tempeh. Shit is nasty.”

“We don’t actually eat that much tempeh,” Julie said, feeling himself blushing at the thought of the hopeless Berkeletude of himself and his family. “I don’t know why it was even in our fridge. And no, that’s not it.”

“What, then?”